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Enhancing Conceptual Knowledge of Energy in Biology with Incorrect Representations

Energy is an important concept in all natural sciences, and a challenging one for school science education. Students’ conceptual knowledge of energy is often low, and they entertain misconceptions. Educational research in science and mathematics suggests that learning through depictive representatio...

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Autores principales: Wernecke, Ulrike, Schütte, Kerstin, Schwanewedel, Julia, Harms, Ute
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: American Society for Cell Biology 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6007766/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29351908
http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-07-0133
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author Wernecke, Ulrike
Schütte, Kerstin
Schwanewedel, Julia
Harms, Ute
author_facet Wernecke, Ulrike
Schütte, Kerstin
Schwanewedel, Julia
Harms, Ute
author_sort Wernecke, Ulrike
collection PubMed
description Energy is an important concept in all natural sciences, and a challenging one for school science education. Students’ conceptual knowledge of energy is often low, and they entertain misconceptions. Educational research in science and mathematics suggests that learning through depictive representations and learning from errors, based on the theory of negative knowledge, can potentially foster students’ knowledge of abstract concepts such as energy. Thus, we propose here an instructional approach that combines these two strategies to foster conceptual knowledge of energy. It involves inserting an error in a biological energy flow diagram, an error that we derived from two prevalent misconceptions about energy: 1) plants get some of their energy from the soil or 2) energy cycles in an ecosystem. The approach’s effect on students’ conceptual knowledge of energy was tested in an intervention study with pre–post design and 304 ninth grade students (M = 14.79 years). Students who successfully identified and explained the error achieved larger gains in conceptual knowledge than students learning with a correct diagram. Thus, the proposed instructional approach holds promise for improving energy teaching.
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spelling pubmed-60077662018-07-02 Enhancing Conceptual Knowledge of Energy in Biology with Incorrect Representations Wernecke, Ulrike Schütte, Kerstin Schwanewedel, Julia Harms, Ute CBE Life Sci Educ Article Energy is an important concept in all natural sciences, and a challenging one for school science education. Students’ conceptual knowledge of energy is often low, and they entertain misconceptions. Educational research in science and mathematics suggests that learning through depictive representations and learning from errors, based on the theory of negative knowledge, can potentially foster students’ knowledge of abstract concepts such as energy. Thus, we propose here an instructional approach that combines these two strategies to foster conceptual knowledge of energy. It involves inserting an error in a biological energy flow diagram, an error that we derived from two prevalent misconceptions about energy: 1) plants get some of their energy from the soil or 2) energy cycles in an ecosystem. The approach’s effect on students’ conceptual knowledge of energy was tested in an intervention study with pre–post design and 304 ninth grade students (M = 14.79 years). Students who successfully identified and explained the error achieved larger gains in conceptual knowledge than students learning with a correct diagram. Thus, the proposed instructional approach holds promise for improving energy teaching. American Society for Cell Biology 2018 /pmc/articles/PMC6007766/ /pubmed/29351908 http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-07-0133 Text en © 2018 U. Wernecke et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2018 The American Society for Cell Biology. “ASCB®” and “The American Society for Cell Biology®” are registered trademarks of The American Society for Cell Biology. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License.
spellingShingle Article
Wernecke, Ulrike
Schütte, Kerstin
Schwanewedel, Julia
Harms, Ute
Enhancing Conceptual Knowledge of Energy in Biology with Incorrect Representations
title Enhancing Conceptual Knowledge of Energy in Biology with Incorrect Representations
title_full Enhancing Conceptual Knowledge of Energy in Biology with Incorrect Representations
title_fullStr Enhancing Conceptual Knowledge of Energy in Biology with Incorrect Representations
title_full_unstemmed Enhancing Conceptual Knowledge of Energy in Biology with Incorrect Representations
title_short Enhancing Conceptual Knowledge of Energy in Biology with Incorrect Representations
title_sort enhancing conceptual knowledge of energy in biology with incorrect representations
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6007766/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29351908
http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-07-0133
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